Ummm… Hi. It’s me, Moobs. I haven’t written anything in such a long time and this “narrative essay” was thrusted upon me for school. So I decided to share it with you guys. Enjoy!

Growing up I was not partially found of academics. Whether it is English, math, or science, the only thing I found interesting was music and using my hands. Playing drums as a teenager felt like the only thing in the world except when I was building and wielding stuff. These were the things I excelled in and would help me later in life. It wasn’t until I was sitting at the JFK Airport in New York did I even get back into reading books after having been on hiatus for a half decade.

While sitting bored in the airport, I decided to see if I could find a magazine to read as we waited for the plane to finally arrive. Upon entering the store, a title of a book popped out at me, “Killing Yourself to Live” by Chuck Klosterman. Little did I know that this book would change my life for the next five years.

The book was a work of non-fiction. The book’s author, Chuck Klosterman, was put on an assignment, by GQ Magazine, to cross America and see first-hand the places where the sadder side of rock’s history took place. This meant traveling to the Chelsea Hotel to see where Sex Pistols bassist, Sid Vicious, was found to have been stabbed to death to driving across the continent to Seattle to visit, even though it was not his death place, the childhood home of Kurt Cobain and everywhere between. At the time, with boredom pounding me over the head like a hammer, I found this to truly spark an interest inside me, an interest I did not know I ever had. I ended up reading half the book while flying back to Houston and the next day I finished it when I finally returned home to Austin.

Once I finally read the book a few months passed with one thing mainly on my mind, “I want to do this too!” Even though I had always wanted to write a book, (it sounded cool even though I was not into writing at all until this point) I knew I would not have the patience to dedicate my life to something so time consuming. So I started a blog. It was a simple blog. When I felt like writing I would get a bottle of liquor, wine, or beer, get wasty-faced, and write things I thought were the funniest things in the world or just to tell a tale. There was no writing structure to it, no deadlines, it was just me writing when I wanted and that was all. I was content and that is all I ever needed to be.

About two months after starting this personal blog, I found out that one of my friends, Steven, also enjoyed writing. We eventually decided to team up and with the help of some of his best friends we started our own blog; one built with teamwork and immaturity. We would write things we assumed were thought provoking and about our drunken shenanigans. The title of this blog after a few weeks became known as TDI, The Drunken Intellects.

The Drunken Intellects, ironically named due to the fact that none of us were scholars or remotely intellectual, was a group of 6 twenty-somethings year olds (and later adding more) writing things that fascinated us while under an alias in case our professional counterparts happened to stumble upon our little world. With this came the power to write whatever we felt that pleased us without fear of some sort of retaliation. Some of the things we wrote about were conspiracies, music reviews, sports, and stories of how we ended up making asses of ourselves while inebriated in public. It was fun, but we always took it serious no matter how immature the blog posts were.

I had always had an urge to write a novel growing up. This just increased that urge. I would write one about a guy who was destined for great things and always got all the ladies. On this blog I made this fictional character a reality. I was that guy. Except my greatness came in the form of playing “gay chicken with a gay man” in a bar downtown so I could see the reverse effect of how girls feel when guys are hitting on them and also seeing the “hotential” in your everyday girl. Yes, I know, it was sexist. I was young.

With “greatness” also came the sad and lonely portion that will eventually come to you when writing. I used the blog as a medium to tell my dreams and have these dreams dissected. Who was the girl with no face? What significance did my elementary school hold in my life? Why were there always 3 blacked out figures chasing me when I was with the girl who had no face no matter how many times we killed ourselves together. It was nice to see how people look at the bad in your life and say, “Dude, you’re being lame.”

The blog was a community of people who accepted you regardless of race, religion, beliefs, or looks. We were there for one thing, to write. We all chimed in on each other’s post. We laughed mostly at each but we also mourned when it was deemed necessary. It made writing fun. We were all badasses in our minds and it made me the writer I am today; a guy who is horrible at grammar, who may cross a line but only by a toe, and takes pride in his work because it is just that, his work.